Vivid Diary May 2005

Diary
Lisa Franzetta

May 2005

It’s pretty humbling to organise a demonstration in a city with a more-or-less recent history of massive popular uprising. As a campaign coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights group, it’s been my good luck to work with some amazing activists in a changing Europe who are eager to put their new freedom to work on behalf of animals. This April, I arrived in Bucharest for PETA’s first-ever demonstration in Romania. Valuable room for shoes in my suitcase was occupied instead by stacks of posters and leaflets, recently translated into Romanian, designed as part of PETA’s international campaign to get KFC to stop some of the very worst abuses to the 750,000 million chickens killed for their restaurants every year. Along with urging consumers to go to www.KentuckyFriedCruelty.com to watch for themselves our undercover video documenting KFC’s abuses (see how I just did that?), staging attention-grabbing protests at KFC restaurants around the world has been a big part of our campaign plan. To that end, I also carried, in suitcase number two, a showgirl-style chicken costume, complete with faux-feather headdress, that has accompanied me to KFC protests from Hong Kong to Wenceslas Square.

For me, animal rights was just a quiet lifestyle for about a decade before I became a chicken-bikini wearing, publicity-seeking activist. As a kid, I’d always thought of myself as an “animal lover,” but never considered the bizarre contradiction of lavishing affection on dogs and cats while eating chickens, cows, fish, and pigs. Eating them – their muscles, their tendons, their gross, squishy organs … or so it finally occurred to me when, at age 16, I read the philosopher Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation. Singer describes the way that modern farming has become a massive global industry – one that makes a mockery of our most basic ideas of welfare for the billions of animals it slaughters every year. A couple of chapters in, I realised I could no longer eat or wear animals. At the same time, I opted out of dissecting animals in my high school science classes. I went on to spend four years of college squinting through microscopes, traipsing through tide pools, and tending to crusty Petri dishes – but never once dissecting an animal. And while the scientific canon is certainly no richer for the sacrifice at my hands of what must have been countless millions of microscopic algae, it is gratifying to know that I got my degree in biology – the study of life – without being responsible for the death of anything with a nervous system.

I wound up working at PETA six years ago, and have been hauling weird costumes with me through airport security checks ever since. Seeing different cities, both abroad and at home in the States, has been an undeniably awesome opportunity, but it’s the activists I’ve met along the way who have been responsible for my very best (and weirdest) experiences. Some of my favourite people anywhere are a group of activists living in Zagreb, who started an organisation called Animal Friends Croatia a few years back. With them, I did a tour of demonstrations promoting vegetarianism throughout northern Croatia two summers ago. It was endlessly impressive, and entertaining, to watch them hustle in a way I never have to at home, where there are relatively limitless resources at my disposal. In San Francisco I can walk into the corner sandwich shop and order a vegan cheesesteak right off the menu. In Zagreb, the morning of our first Croatian demonstration, Domagoj and Luka from Animal Friends hefted an unmarked brown bag weighing about 75 pounds into the middle of their kitchen and began removing nuggets of TVP (texturized vegetable protein, a pretty basic dehydrated meat substitute that, back home, would now be considered a bit passé even among the most nostalgic vegetarians). As they dropped the nuggets we would be distributing as samples of “delicious alternatives to meat” into a pot of boiling broth, they explained with pride that, while there was none to be found within their own borders, they managed to have a supply of TVP brought in from the Czech Republic. “We have this guy …” they explained, trailing off. The specifics of their whole importation scheme were rather vague, and I didn’t pry into whatever details they were sparing me. The contraband nuggets were really pretty good alongside a slice of bread slathered with ajvar.

A couple of years later, their group now has branches of activists in a couple of dozen Croatian towns, and they have been networking with activists throughout the Balkans. “We were even starting to work with some activists in Serbia, but then, you know, the Serbian prime minister was killed ...” Domagoj rolled his eyes. He seemed so off-hand in referencing the inconvenience of executive-level assassination for one’s animal rights campaigns. How nearly impossible to resist the temptation to say, “Yeah, I hate it when that happens.”

Our protests are generally well attended by curious local police, but I’ve only wound up in the pokey about half a dozen times. Back in Europe this past February, I was arrested doing an anti-fur demonstration during Fashion Week in Milan. An Italian activist friend who lives there had met me upon my arrival and declared sourly: “Welcome to the graveyard of fashion.” And despite the impending thaw, it seemed true enough that the old habit of stomping down Via della Spiga in a cavewoman-esque coat made of 60 or so skinned animals was dying hard back in the my grandparents’ homeland. In protest of Prada’s shameless use of fur, including the fur of baby seals bludgeoned and shot by the hundreds of thousands each spring in Canada, I stood in the window of their flagship store in Milan’s central galleria, hands painted blood-red, and unfurled a banner reading “Death for Sale–www.FurIsDead.com.” I was joined by (and, for added dramatic effect, handcuffed to) my PETA Germany co-worker, Juergen, a large Austrian man with a penchant for dressing up like a butcher and creatively sabotaging various butcher festivities. About fifteen activists occupied the central galleria outside the store and chanted –“Prada, Prada, Assassini!”– until the cops called off the fun, nabbing for good measure a third activist, Nuria, a medical student who lectures against vivisection back in her home city of Barcelona.

I had spent the previous 48 hours in Milan scoping out the Prada boutique, using vegan food and a cornucopia of PETA stickers to bribe my local activist contacts to skip work and attend the protest, and, not least, shamelessly begging the Italian press corps to come broadcast the action. So I didn’t entirely mind the chance to cave in to jetlag once settled in our Milanese jail cell. After about four hours in the lock-up, Nuria and I were joined in the ladies’ (ahem) cell by two Peruvian transsexual prostitutes. They seemed quite at home in the jailhouse and barely noticed that I appeared to be covered in fake blood. My Spanish language skills are best suited to ordering a burrito or discussing the weather with a three-year-old, but I understood them when they asked us, not unkindly, “So, are you little whores, too?” I hesitated too long before answering.

In Bucharest, though, despite a last-minute denial of our permit application for the Magheru Blvd KFC protest, I had no interest in having a costume-clad, personal experience of the Romanian criminal justice system. The activists I was working with were all Romanians or expats who had, at some point in the previous year or so, independently contacted PETA with offers to help out in any way they could. Little did they suspect I would show up in a chicken suit to cash in on their good intentions. We e-mailed for several weeks leading up to the event, getting our translations in order and trying to recruit friends of friends, semi-vegetarians, and anyone with enough curiosity to come out and hold a poster for the hour-long demonstration. Our plan was for a fun, peaceful event with aggressive leafleting and a lot of not-illegal shouting from the sidewalk about KFC’s cruelty to chickens. But the night before, I threw together a just-in-case Plan B in the event of my arrest – letting the locals know to notify the press, call my boss at PETA, and, when they got around to it, spring me out of jail. “But what if we get arrested too?” I hate it when someone thinks to mention Plan C. (There is no Plan C). As it happened, Plan A went off that Friday at noon without a hitch. Two of Bucharest’s finest constabulary looked on from a distance as more than a dozen activists and I spent the hour conversing with passersby, explaining our campaign to reporters, preening for camera phone snapshots, and, let’s hope, annoying the hell out of KFC management.

Later that night, I went to the Lebanese restaurant Piccolo Mondo with two of Bucharest’s new PETA activists – a pretty Romanian legal advisor named Laura and, in the interest of full disclosure, the editor of this magazine. We were still high on adrenaline from the hugely successful protest, and busy making plans for future PETA actions in Romania. In addition to being a great day for chickens, it had been the beginning of a new solidarity among a crew of activists who now realised they were not going it alone in their city. There’s a big difference between thinking you are the only one who cares about stopping violence against animals and seeing first-hand that you are actually among a group of students, professionals, young punks, and little old ladies who feel the same way. It’s the difference between feeling like you are powerless to really make a change for animals and being motivated to get on with it already and start making good things happen. We said our goodbyes after our big vegan dinner, and I handed Laura a PETA T-shirt I had brought with me as a little token of thanks for her help. She looked at the simple white shirt and beamed to me, in all sincerity: “It’s amazing.” And it really was, but not in the way that she was thinking.

Lisa Franzetta is a Senior Coordinator of PETA's International Grassroots Campaigns to protest against animal abuse.